Gamasutra has published another amazing featured article for audio, with Rob Bridgett, who examines the key issues and possible solutions to common problems in game dialogue production.
Dialogue production for a large budget, cinematic video game can often be an intense and often brutally challenging process. Getting an actor in the booth and reading a script is in itself a monumental achievement that requires solid tools, pipelines, and communication.
AdvertisementWhile there are a great many articles written about the voice actor’s process and performance, there is a dearth of information about the technical process and steps that are taken prior to and after the recording session, and it is these processes, planning, and techniques “behind the scenes” on which this feature will concentrate.
There is a wide spectrum of different approaches to dialogue tools and production process throughout the industry. It is fair to say in fact that almost every developer has a totally different way of working, and there is certainly no rulebook — as long as the job gets done to the desired quality.
However, working on an integrated dialogue database solution from beginning to end of production can speed up process, reduce organisation and administration time both in and out of recording sessions, and remove a whole slew of duplicated work and a mess of multiple scripts from various members of the dialogue production team.
The desire and benefits are clearly there for a tightening up of the production process and integration of dialogue through a single master database. Sadly dialogue is one of the areas that audio directors and audio designers can be less passionate about, and the lack of investment in solid tools, process and pipelines is probably due in some part to this.
Dialogue, it can be argued, is perhaps the single most important aspect of video game audio, in that it is often the only element of the audio that a reviewer will mention, and poorly implemented and badly directed dialogue can completely ruin an entire game.
Dialogue production also has very deep dependencies stemming from within mission design, story architecture, and it’s anchored at the heart of cinematic production dependencies. To this end it needs to be one of the tightest and most organized and “locked-down” elements of audio production, yet remain completely fluid and open to change all the way along the chain.
df says
“Getting an actor in the booth and reading a script is in itself a monumental achievement”
hmmm… What?
Steven says
Wow, as a game developer, you have some great information in your postings, bookmarked this site! Looking forward to more and more articles. Thanks! – Steven
LiterallyGaming.com says
I always liked dialogue as a gamer, it always made the game more exciting. I never realized it that it could be difficult.
flight pro sim says
I am studying the animation course. Thanks for share this article and I find that it’s very important for me to know what is the procedure to produce the dialogue for Video Games because I am planning to apply for a game developer job once I was graduate. I would recommend those who want to know more about how to producing dialogue for video games should read this post. Great post:)